Chapter 36: Good
Johnny let out a desperate, strangled, almost inhuman cry when Allie opened the door to the hotel room. The noise cut through Sami's fear and reminded her that she had made the only possible decision.
He brought them here. He stole Johnny. He would have raped Allie. He broke up their family. He would have destroyed them again and again, like he did to me. Like his father did to my mother.
Johnny and Allie hugged each other hard, with Johnny asking over and over again if
Allie was really all right. Sami found her arms full of Will. Will reached for Lucas next, but Sami refused to let go, and the three of them fell into something like a huddle.
"Did you do it?" Will whispered hoarsely.
"We did it," Lucas replied just as roughly.
"We brought your sister home," Sami clarified after an appropriate pause. She knew that Will had to know the truth, on some level, but she was hardly going to make him an accessory after the fact by confirming his suspicions in no uncertain terms. When she thought about it, she was still a little irritated at Lucas for telling a teenage Will that he had shot EJ weeks before he confessed to the police.
"Good," said Will, and from the way his voice cracked Sami could tell that he understood perfectly. "I wish—I wish I could have—"
"We couldn't have done it without you, Bud," Lucas told him. "You did good. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is step back and let someone else be in control. That kind of trust…"
"That kind of trust isn't easy for any of us," Sami murmured. "But we all pulled it off today."
"Is it… over?" Will wanted to know.
Sami and Lucas exchanged a long, pained look. "I doubt it," Sami admitted. "But if we stick together, we're through the worst part." Until eternal damnation, that is. "If we explain that we were so worried about Allie… that everything was because we had to find Allie… we didn't think of anything else…"
"Well, we didn't!" Will snapped, as if he were already defending his actions to the investigators who would surely come to interview him sooner rather than later. His head shot up; his eyes blazed, then softened when he saw Joy trying to slip unnoticed from the room.
Sami followed Will's gaze. "Will, why don't you walk Joy back to her room?" She glanced next at the twins. "You two catch up. I need to talk to your Dad, but we'll all… talk about what's next in half an hour. All right?"
Allie and Will acknowledged Sami; Johnny did not. Nonetheless, he was relieved when Sami and Lucas and Will and Joy left, and he was alone with Allie. He had a sick feeling that he already knew exactly what had happened, but he couldn't bring himself to ask a virtual stranger to confirm it.
"Allie?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't make him ask the question out loud.
Allie's round face filled with pity. "You should sit down."
Johnny didn't need her instruction. His knees had gone weak and he might have fallen if he hadn't sat. Allie sat beside him. "There was an explosion at… at our old home. EJ was there. There's no way he survived."
Johnny hadn't thought it was possible to get dizzier, but it was. When he'd seen EJ's battered body in prison, he'd nearly fainted, and now he was in danger of that again. Each breath was painful, fast, and shallow. He was suddenly cold and started to shiver.
Allie pulled a blanket around Johnny's shoulders and put a bottle of water in his hand. That made Johnny feel worse instead of better. Allie had been knocked out and kidnapped by a man who had tried to rape her, and she was the one comforting Johnny because he was upset that her abductor was dead. Try as he might, Johnny couldn't quite resolve the image of Father, who had played with him and talked with him and tucked him into bed at night, with the image of EJ DiMera, the man who had held his mother hostage and attacked his sister. And now Father and EJ were both dead. The last time Johnny had seen EJ, he had hurt him, but the last time Johnny had seen Father, he had hurt him, too. Now he was going to see EJ or Father again.
"Are you okay?" Johnny asked Allie when he was able to speak, even though he had already asked her half a dozen times.
"Don't worry about me. I'm worried about you."
"It's good that he's dead," Johnny said, but he didn't mean it. "I loved him," he added, and that part he meant.
"I know."
"Do you hate me for that?"
Allie shook her head solemnly. "You're my twin. I could never hate you. You thought he was your father for most of your life. It wouldn't be natural if you didn't miss him."
Johnny couldn't think of anything to say to that.
"Do you want to talk about him?"
"No." He couldn't talk about Father without talking about EJ, and he couldn't ask Allie to talk about EJ. He couldn't put his thoughts into words, anyway. The voices and images and guilt and grief were too tangled up.
"If you want to sometime—talk about the good things—remember how we were happy with him once, we can."
Hearing Allie sound sweet and attentive and earnest was starting to get on Johnny's nerves. He knew that she had every reason to hate EJ, but she seemed strangely unconcerned with the knowledge that her dad—their dad—Lucas—had probably done the killing. Wasn't murder supposed to be worse than rape?
"Doesn't it bother you at all?" Johnny asked finally. "Knowing Lucas was the one who killed him?"
"He wasn't," said Allie, with surprise.
"But he killed people before."
"That was in self defense. And as far as I'm concerned, this would have been self defense too, if he'd done it. But EJ took me back to the townhouse so he could get some things he needed, and because he knew Mom would go there looking for him. Mom and Dad were there. Dad took me and left, and when we left EJ was alive. Dad was with me from then on, until he left just now. He couldn't have done it, unless he set the house on some kind of timer to explode and then left Mom there. But we didn't expect EJ to do what he did at the sentencing, so I don't know how Dad could have planned—"
"So it was Mom?" Johnny found it harder to get outraged about that, even if he did miss Father so much that he couldn't even bring himself to touch the pain yet. After all, EJ had raped her and held her captive and tried to steal her children.
"I don't know. He had… a couple of people with him who drove over with us. One of them could have turned on him because he wanted the guns or the money or something. Or he could have blown himself up, rather than go to prison?"
"Or it could have been Mom."
"He took so much away from her," Allie pleaded.
"I miss him anyway."
"Yeah. I know. But you should talk to Mom. She knows more about what happened. What happened today and what happened to make EJ pretend you were his son. You might feel better if you just tried to talk to her about EJ."
"I will," Johnny agreed.
Allie and Johnny embraced again.
The minute there was a locked door between Sami and her children, she threw her arms around Lucas' neck and kissed him deeply. As Lucas began to respond, she shoved his coat to the floor and unbuttoned his shirt.
"Wait, wait, wait." Lucas caught her quickly moving hands and pinned them to her sides. "What are you doing?"
"Let me keep at it, and you'll figure it out eventually," Sami pleaded, desperately trying to free herself.
"Murder turns you on, or something?"
"No!" Sami snapped, and burst into furious tears. She would have fallen to the floor had Lucas not caught her and placed her on the bed.
As long as she was on the bed anyway, she decided to make use of it. Still teary and trembling with fear and anger, she reached for Lucas' belt and unfastened it. Then she unzipped his fly.
Unzipping a man's fly was, to Sami, one of the most emotionally overwhelming parts of sex—almost as much so as the moment of entry and the moment of climax. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she would always remember her first time with Alan (no matter how many times she told herself that that didn't really count as her first time). Alan had pinned her down as he'd unzipped his fly and removed his penis. EJ had pinned her down with words instead of hands, but he, too, had eagerly removed his own penis from his clothing. When Sami did the unzipping herself, she knew that she was making a choice. She was choosing this man, and trusting that he chose her, too.
Lucas swatted her hands away again. "Stop that!"
"Why are you being so difficult?" Sami demanded. She could feel Lucas starting to respond to her. He wanted her. He'd even said he loved her back at the townhouse.
She ripped off her own shirt and slacks, noticing once more the blood that stained them. "It's his blood, his blood, look at it, Lucas!"
Lucas covered Sami's mouth with his hand. "The twins are next door. Would you like to make them accessories after the fact? Would you like our neighbors in the next room over to hear you?"
Sami began to cry again, but when Lucas moved his hand, she spoke in a low voice. "Believe me when I tell you, the legal system is the least of my worries. They'll buy it when I tell them I was insane, I was protecting Allie. And if they don't, they don't. I'll go to prison. It will be worth it to know that EJ will never put his hands on Allie or Johnny or Will again."
"So you're not concerned about the police or prison," said Lucas skeptically. At any other time he might have looked comical standing there with his shirt mostly unbuttoned and his pants hanging half off. But Sami was only concerned with the extent to which Lucas did not get it. "Then what?"
"What?" she hissed. "I killed a man. On purpose, after I thought about it for days. I killed a man who used to be my friend, who I thought was Johnny's father! It's not like I had a choice, but I hate myself and God hates me, too."
"What are you talking about? God doesn't hate you."
"Yes, He does. He's going to punish me. So before I begin my eternal torment, I'd like to make love with you."
"Sami, I don't think this is a good idea—"
"Why not? What if it's our only chance? What if we're about to be separated again, and this time it's permanent?"
"That's not going to happen."
"Even if it doesn't…." Sami trailed off. She had distracted herself for a few moments by trying to seduce Lucas, but now that she knew that her seduction had failed, she felt nothing but numb. She wandered back to the bed, virtually naked, and collapsed onto it, curling onto her side. She still couldn't stop herself from shaking.
She didn't look up or respond when she felt the bed shift under Lucas' weight and then felt Lucas' body close against her own. "Shh. It's all right," he murmured, but she felt nothing.
"I want…" Sami began, but she couldn't finish the thought. It didn't matter what she wanted. She had decided to kill a man and she had gone ahead and done it. People like her didn't deserve happiness. They didn't deserve to feel. She didn't deserve anything but to remember EJ's mangled corpse and the way EJ had always rocked baby Johnny in his arms.
"What?" Lucas whispered. She knew his breath was on her neck, but she couldn't feel it. She would have known his voice anywhere, but this time it didn't make her heart melt.
"Sami, are you there?" Lucas tried. But Sami wasn't there. She was watching EJ bleed.
"Sami, the police aren't going to wait for long. Neither are Will and the twins. You need to come back," Lucas prompted.
His warm body moved away from hers, but she couldn't protest. She shouldn't have anything good.
Lucas gently turned Sami onto her back and bent down to kiss her. The kiss sent jolts of heat through the numbness, and Sami guiltily opened her eyes.
"So beautiful," Lucas whispered as if to himself. Then his steady gaze met Sami's wavery one. "The kiss always wakes the princess, right?"
"I'm hardly a princess."
Lucas kissed her again. "I think you are."
Sami lifted one hand and ran it down Lucas' shoulder, over his back, and up and down his side as he had always liked.
"You need to forget for a few minutes, don't you? You need a break before we take the next step? That's why you were attacking me like that?"
"Wasn't attacking," Sami mumbled. "Maybe."
"Maybe," Lucas repeated.
"I remember when the DiMeras made us believe my mom had killed half of Salem. I was so… numb after so much of my family died, you know? And that one night, I started drinking, and then I went kind of crazy, and then you had to hit me a little because I was hysterical…"
"Don't remind me."
Sami's eyes filled with fresh tears. "But then, when we got back from the police station, that night… you remember that night?"
"Very well."
"You were the only one who could make me feel, make me feel anything, let alone feel good."
Lucas sighed, and the sound broke Sami's heart. "We could do that again," Lucas conceded at last.
"No. Not if you don't want to. I thought you really did, but if you don't, we shouldn't."
Lucas kissed her collarbone and then her stomach. "I want to."
"I heard that sigh. I think people in Salem heard that sigh."
"I sighed because this isn't the way I imagined it. But now that I think about it, that doesn't mean it isn't right."
"You imagined this?"
"So many times." He rubbed his hips against hers.
"I love you, Lucas." Sami pulled Lucas into one more kiss before wrapping her legs around his body.
"I love you, too."
TBC